Transcript

1.
Social Media in Australia:
The Case of Twitter
Assoc. Prof. Axel Bruns
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology
@snurb_dot_info
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

8.
SOCIAL MEDIA, POLITICS, AND TEACHING
• Teaching social media:
– Social media are now well-established in the media ecology
– Debates of mainstream vs. social media are passé
– For some media professions, tools such as Twitter are now essential
– Few students going into media professions will find jobs without having
strong social media knowledge
• Social media and the wider media ecology:
– Key roles especially around breaking news and unfolding crises
– Also important backchannel to television and mainstream news
– Mainstream journalism vs. citizen journalism debate is over
– But: significant digital divides remain – demographics, skills, devices

13.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND SOCIETY
• The public sphere on / of / and social media:
– Social media are now a key space for publics to form:
– How do these publics relate to the wider public sphere?
• Do they represent it (or parts of it)?
• Do they influence it? Are they influenced by it?
• ad hoc publics,
often rapidly forming
and dissolving
macro:
#hashtags
• personal publics,
accumulating slowly
and relatively stable
meso:
follower networks
• interpersonal
communication,
ephemeral
micro:
@replies
(Bruns & Moe, 2013)

16.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND / AS BIG DATA
• ‘Big Data’:
– Increasingly important field of research and development
– Significant applications from science to public services
– Social media are a key source of big data on society
– Many important questions about ethics and privacy yet to be addressed
• ‘Big Data’ jobs in the media industries:
– Data journalists to support complex investigative reporting
– Data analysts for market research, policy development, …
– Data scientists to build ‘big data’ tools and applications

17.
‘BIG DATA’ AND RESEARCH SKILLS
• Researchers need interdisciplinary skill sets:
– Media & communication to understand the media environment
– Maths and statistics to deal with ‘big data’
– Computer science to develop tools to process social media data
– Communication design to develop effective visualisations
– Writing and communication skills to communicate the results
– …
– Where do we find them?
(few people have such a diverse range of skills)
– How do we support their work?
(we’re only just developing our methods and tools)
– What is our strategy for dealing with precarity?
(sudden API changes, changing fortunes of platforms, …)